Tasteful Distance

[...] working-class people, who expect every image to fulfil a function, if only that of a sign, refer, often explicitly, to norms of morality or agreeableness in all their judgements.

Thus the photograph of a dead soldier provokes judgements which, whether positive or negative, are always responses to the reality of the thing represented or to the functions the representation could serve, the horror of war or the denunciation of the horrors of war which the photographer is supposed to produce simply by showing that horror.

If formal explorations, in avant-garde theatre or non-figurative painting, or simply classical music, are disconcerting to working-class people, this is partly because they feel incapable of understanding what these things signify, insofar as they are signs.

[Pierre Bourdieu]Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, p.41-3

The aesthetic disposition which tends to bracket off the nature and function of the object represented and to exclude any 'naive' reaction

- horror at the horrible, desire for the desirable, pious reverence for the sacred -

along with all purely ethical responses,

in order to concentrate solely upon the mode of representation, the style, perceived and appreciated by comparison with other styles,

is one dimension of a total relation to the world and to others, a life-style, in which the effects of particular conditions of existence are expressed in a 'misrecognizable' form.

These
conditions of existence, which are the precondition for all learning of
legitimate culture, whether implicit and diffuse, as domestic cultural
training generally is, or explicit and specific, as in scholastic
training, are characterized by the suspension and removal of economic necessity and by objective and subjective distance from practical urgencies, which is the basis of objective and subjective distance from groups subjected to those determinisms.

The
aesthetic disposition, a generalized capacity to neutralize ordinary
urgencies and to bracket off practical ends, a durable inclination and
aptitude for practice without a practical function, can only be
constituted within an experience of the world freed from urgency and
through the practice of activities which are an end in themselves, such
as scholastic exercises or the contemplation of works of art.

In other words, it presupposes the distance from the world [...] which is the basis of the bourgeois experience of the world.

It
is not surprising that bourgeois adolescents, who are both economically
privileged and (temporarily) excluded from the reality of economic
power, sometimes express their distance from the bourgeois world which
they cannot really appropriate by a refusal of complicity, whose most
refined expression is a propensity towards aesthetics and aestheticism.

[...]
the aesthetic disposition is defined, objectively and subjectively, in
relation to other dispositions. Objective distance from necessity and
from those trapped within it combines with a conscious distance which
doubles freedom by exhibiting it.

This affirmation of
power over a dominated necessity always implies a claim to legitimate
superiority over those who, because they cannot assert the same contempt
for contingencies in gratuitous luxury and conspicuous consumption,
remain dominated by ordinary interests and urgencies.

The
tastes of freedom can only assert themselves as such in relation to the
tastes of necessity, which are thereby brought to the level of the
aesthetic and so defined as vulgar.

[Pierre Bourdieu]Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, p.54-6

[The detachment of the aesthete] is seen whenever he appropriates one
of the objects of popular taste (e.g., Westerns or strip cartoons),

[introducing] a distance, a gap - the measure of his distant distinction
- vis-a-vis 'first-degree' perception, by displacing the interest from
the 'content', characters, plot, etc., to the form, to the specifically
artistic effects which are only appreciated relationally, through a
comparison with other works which is incompatible with immersion in the
singularity of the work immediately given.

Detachment,
disinterestedness, indifference - aesthetic theory has so often
presented these as the only way to recognize the work of art for what it
is, autonomous, selbständig, that one ends up forgetting that they really mean disinvestment, detachment, indifference, in other words, the refusal to invest oneself and take things seriously.

[...]
the refusal of any sort of involvement, any 'vulgar' surrender to easy
seduction and collective enthusiasm, which is, indirectly at least, the
origin of the taste for formal complexity and objectless
representations, is perhaps most clearly seen in reactions to paintings.

Thus
one finds that the higher the level of education, the greater is the
proportion of respondents who, when asked whether a series of objects
would make beautiful photographs, refuse the ordinary objects of popular
admiration - a first communion, a sunset or a landscape - as 'vulgar'
or 'ugly', or reject them as 'trivial', silly, a bit 'wet', or, in
Ortega y Gasset's terms, naively human [...]

[Pierre Bourdieu]Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, p.34-5